In the kitchen one day, Clara opened a piece of mail addressed to Mandy. It was an announcement for an anniversary show at The Drawing Center. Artists who had shown there were invited to submit one drawing each. Clara thought of her favorite drawing, of two figures together, their intimacy expressed in their postures, the openness of their faces, the way their limbs reached to enclose one another. The picture had moved Clara even before she knew for sure it was a drawing of Mandy and her. She was tempted to submit it. But what was the point now? “I remember how excited you were when she got into that show.” Lonnie sipped his tea and leaned back on his chair’s hind legs. It was a habit Clara had almost forgotten about, and she couldn’t remember if it bothered her before. It certainly did now. She hoped it didn’t show; she didn’t feel entitled to the annoyance. “I thought it was her big break, after the opportunity with Gallery K fizzled. Her first museum show!” she said, distracting herself. “I remember her being transfixed by the waiter with the red shoes at the party.” “Hmmm. She was otherwise in a foul mood. The sight of those shoes was the only thing she responded to all night.” “She even managed to be paranoid about the friends who came out to support her, if I remember right.” “She should have been on top of the world, but she was too busy being irritated. She was even mad at me for submitting her slides without her permission.” “She never realized all the things you did for her, did she. All those submissions, all that research. You only ever mentioned the acceptances to her, to shield her from rejections. You never let her know about those.” “I knew she wouldn’t develop a thick skin from rejections. I knew she would disintegrate instead.” Helping Mandy had been a process full of false starts. One time, Clara brought an application form to Mandy, sprawled on the couch. What was she looking at beyond the balcony to the parking lot below? A man bouncing a ball on the asphalt? A child skateboarding? “This announcement from your old school came in the mail today, addressed to you. I guess you haven’t have time to read it.” “I figured they just wanted money.” “No, it’s an application for a show for their graduates. You can submit two slides.” “They probably charge for the privilege.” “It’s a tiny entry fee. We can swing it.” Clara handed the paper to Mandy, who halfheartedly took it. She gave it a glance, then put it on the floor and placed her bottle on top of it. “I’ll get to it later,” she said. She didn’t. Clara did. When Mandy was chosen for that particular show, she was more irritated with her sister for filling out the application than she was happy for the acceptance. “Why did you choose those two pictures to submit?” she complained. “I’ve got better ones.” “I chose them because you couldn’t be bothered,” Clara said. “They are fine pieces. They got accepted, didn’t they? ” On the night of the opening, Mandy dressed not in bohemian-black but in layers of grey: two grey tee shirts of different hues and sleeve lengths, and darker grey pants. Clara took it all in and said, “You look as if you’d like to erase yourself.” Her sister pointed to her fine blonde hair. “No chance, with this. It’s my beacon in the night, like Mom always says. No way could I ever be erased.” Agreed. The girl had presence, what with the hair, her pretty legs and delicate hands. But there were other ways in which Mandy wanted attention, and she would not be ignored. She pitched her latest idea about that to Clara as they sat in a booth at The Tavern later that night. Mandy was still vibrating with the excitement of the show, and did not want to go back to the apartment right away. “I think we should share Lonnie. It’s nice that you have someone and all, but I’m here dying of loneliness. It’s not fair.” Her meaning was clear, but Clara answered as if to a different question altogether. “I suppose he wouldn’t mind if you came along with us sometimes. That is, if we stay together.” “That’s not what I meant! And what do you mean, if you stay together? Why wouldn’t you?” “Well. Apparently I’ve got baggage.” “Huh. Anyways, I don’t want a buddy. I want someone to sleep with. He’s young and healthy. He could take care of both of us.” She grinned. A taunt. A dare. An inveiglement. Clara steadied her voice and said, “Oh, come on. You aren’t remotely attracted to him. You kind of hate him, actually.” Mandy stared at her sister for a moment, and then laughed the careless laugh that she would use again and again. It was if a spell had been broken, and the lights in the room had come up. “It was just an idea,” she said. It was time to go; there was nothing left to say. The sisters pushed their way out of the building, Mandy pointing to a naked girl dancing on top of the bar. “Brenda’s at it again, doing her one parlor trick.” She must have undressed fast, because all she had on were socks, grey ankle socks wet with spilled booze. She was in her own little world, oblivious to the crowd until their clapping became the accompaniment to an obscene chant. When the sound penetrated her brain, she stopped abruptly, gasped, and crisscrossed her body with her arms. She began to cry, and then ran to the restroom. “I guess I better see to her,” Mandy said. Time passed, too much of it. Tired of waiting for her sister, Clara followed a stream of people out the door. Some of them she’d seen before, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone. All she wanted was to get a breath of fresh air before Mandy came back. She didn’t mean to get caught in the pulsating crowd, traveling on what felt like a moving walkway, but wasn’t. She was hemmed in on all sides. The slow-motion stampede finally dispersed a few feet away from an old train station a couple of blocks from the bar. It looked like a ruin from another time, especially with the cold light from the moon bathing it. Clubbers milled around the fire escape, pulling flasks and bottles from the inside of their coats. They arranged themselves like props surrounding the single lit window of a lobby inside. Scratchy radio music came from somewhere, but there were no people visible. Clara moved with the rhythm, anonymous as a machine, as she made her way back to the bar. She wouldn’t want to lose her sister in the crush. Mandy was probably getting anxious about her whereabouts, but no, wrong again—perched on the staircase, there she was, untangling herself from the man she had just been kissing. She called out, “Clara?” and rushed over to her sister, holding the man’s hand. “Can you drive us to this guy’s house?” “I thought you were with Brenda.” “She gave me the slip when I told her I was here with you. Anyways, look! It’s my old friend Ron. He runs a gallery!” “There are two of you! It’s my lucky day!” The young man kissed Clara’s hand; she pulled it away. “I’m only the chauffeur.” “Too bad. I like big blondes.” “Hey!” Mandy protested. “Little ones too, of course.” Clara did as she was asked, drove where she was directed. She got out with the other two and the young man thought she had reconsidered the tryst. He clapped his greedy hands. “I just need to use your bathroom,” Clara said. He unlocked the door of a characterless brick building and another to the apartment. “It’s the second door on the right.” There was no furniture in the whole place, and only a roll of paper towels in the bathroom. Did Ron really live here? He said he had just bought it. What—today? In that case it was reasonable that it was still bare. Maybe Clara had not stumbled over a headline in the making after all. She drowned her sister’s giggles under the faucet for a minute but realized she couldn’t hide in the bathroom all night, guarding her. She couldn’t sit on the living room floor either, waiting for her, listening to her sounds. There was no other choice but to leave, get back in the car, and begin to wait. She wasn’t wearing a watch, so every few minutes she’d turn on the light to look at the dashboard clock, quickly switching it off before anyone saw her. It would be bad enough if a cop drove up and challenged her about being there, but it could be worse if someone else did. A drug dealer. A rapist. An evangelist looking for converts. If Mandy had known how vulnerable Clara felt, biding her time in the dark emptiness of an unfamiliar neighborhood, she probably would have laughed at her. It’s what she did whenever Clara showed fear—the time they walked in their high heels toward the new club in the bad part of town, or in broad daylight, both of them carrying oversized parts of an easel out of a discount store, being catcalled up and down the street by men whose hopes had long since dried up. When at last Mandy straggled out of the apartment building and saw Clara in the car, she did in fact laugh. She ran toward her sister, wildly waving her arms, laughing all the way down the street—until she began to cry. “Did I just mangle my big chance? He told me he’d put me in a show, but he won’t know how to find me again!” “No, no. Don’t worry. When you said he was a gallerist, I gave him your card with our number on it. He’ll be in touch.” “He’ll lose it. He loses everything. Once he even lost the sale of a painting because he thought the collector was arrogant.” Clara stifled a laugh. “If he loses our number, we’ll just look him up and call him. It’ll be alright.” “I really wanted someone to save me, to lead me into an interesting life.” The sisters had parked at an after-hours bar usually advertised in the arts paper with a grainy photo of a couch draped in a drop cloth. Clara and Mandy went in and sat on the couch. Since no one else was around, Mandy eased her head onto Clara’s lap and Clara stroked her forehead. “Don’t worry so much. You worry too much.” She repeated it like some lullaby until Mandy was calm. Clara thought she had fallen asleep, but all at once Mandy jolted up and out of her embrace. “We better find him before he goes back to New York!” She rushed out of the club and into the car. “We got to go back to his apartment!” Clara started the car and without a word began to drive the long route home. “You’re going the wrong way! Turn around! Turn around!” For once, Clara did not do what Mandy wanted. After the interruption of so much time, Clara was once again traveling in the direction of her own choosing: Lonnie and she, on the same piano bench, playing duets. When they played together, it was as if they still shared the same breath. What did he see when he looked at her these days? How much of her younger self had she kept and how much had she lost? Clara could see thick blue veins and the loose skin of her hands every time she looked down at the keyboard. Lonnie’s hands, the musculature she knew so well, showed the same changes. “When do you suppose we would have noticed this, if we had stayed together?” she said, pressing her thumb on a ropey vein. “Dunno. These things creep up slowly, one at a time, and suddenly you’re inside your parents’ hands, age spots and all.” Clara searched his face to see how he was really bearing up under the inevitable. The blue of his eyes had faded, and the bags grown heavy, as if he had seen too much. Overcome by tenderness, she touched them, one at a time. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, Clara recognized his expression. She’d seen it when she first realized he loved her. And now, here it was again. They made love until the room went dark; but in the dark, as the poet says, the eye begins to see. “Do you think we might have made a big career if we’d gone through with that competition?” Lonnie asked her from the hold of his narrow bed. The question jolted her. “We weren’t really all that good,” she laughed, not believing it, but making light of his thwarted ambition. The competition could have changed everything for them both; but Mandy needed her, and that’s where all of Clara’s attention had to go. A crisis, an emergency, a tipping point− it had happened about a week into one of Amanda’s furious drunken tears. She had called Clara in the middle of the night, saying, “I think I’ve alienated everyone in Baltimore. I don’t even know where I am. I’m so lost. Wait a minute…” and Clara, every cell in her body now alert, heard her ask somebody on the street where she was. “He doesn’t know,” she said into the phone. “But he’s coming over here. Stay back!” and a moment later, “It’s ok, he’s gone.” She spelled out the street signs, and Clara wrote it all down, reading back her nervy handwriting, barely legible even to her. “Stay right there. I’m coming to get you.” Clara called Lonnie to help her find her sister. “I’ll pick you up in front of your building in five minutes,” he said. When she got into the car, she could see he was upset: the set jaw, the fact he had not brushed his teeth or hair, the locked-up silence that pushed down all possibility of casual conversation. They found Mandy in a part of town they had only driven through as a bridge to elsewhere, the dirt and dark sheltering the homeless slumped against skeletal buildings. Each person was cloaked in his own misery, indifferent to the little blonde staring at them behind the wheel of the compact silver car. “I told her not to make eye contact with anyone!” Clara started to get out of the car and sensed movement in the shadows. She reached for Lonnie’s hand and motioned Mandy out of the car with her free one. “Are you mad at me?” Mandy slurred. “Everybody else is. They all hate me.” “Just relax, honey. You’ll be home soon.” Clara took the keys out of her sister’s hands and got in the car. When Mandy started to circle around to the passenger’s side, Clara waved her away and said, “You go with him.” “I want to go with you!” But Clara was already halfway down the street. After issuing a string of protests under her breath, Mandy said to Lonnie, “You’re not so bad. Daddy would like you.” From the backseat where she clutched the yellow plastic bowl Clara had brought for her, Mandy repeated her words between heaves. “Could she be hallucinating?” Lonnie whispered to Clara later, at the girls’ apartment. He had half-carried Mandy to bed, and was watching Clara tuck her in. “Well, she didn’t say she’d actually ask Daddy if he liked you. She’s not seeing him, is she?” Lonnie frowned. “Don’t think so, but she did giggle at something I couldn’t see, and her lips moved in a one-sided conversation. I could see that clearly in the rear-view mirror.” “She’s just drunk, not hallucinating. She recognized us.” “I’m not sure that’s good criteria.” “When my brother visited last month he said all she needed was a job and a boyfriend.” “I think we better get her in to see a real shrink.” Her illness escalated too fast to keep the appointment. A wild-haired Brenda burst into the apartment a week later, holding an empty-eyed Mandy by the hand. While Mandy wandered off to pour herself a drink, Brenda told Clara in a hoarse whisper that they had been riding in circles for the past two hours while Mandy accused her of stealing her paintings. Then she started honking at a police car. The cop pulled them over, and they both got out. Mandy stretched and touched her toes several times in some indecipherable ritual, introduced the policeman to her dead father, and asked the officer to help her find her paintings. “The cop asked me if she’d been having emotional problems, and I said she’d been in a pretty bad mood lately. I didn’t really know what else to say.” Brenda’s chin trembled as she spoke. When the ambulance arrived, Brenda pushed Clara aside and hugged Mandy, hard. She must have believed in that moment she’d never see her again. While the sirens faded in the distance, a howl erupted from her whole being, beginning deep within her body and tunneling up out of her like weather. Gasping through the square of her mouth, she staggered to the window and grabbed onto Mandy’s blackout drapes. She began to savage the curtains, pulling them from the rings, the muscles in her arms quivering. Clara, tears streaming down her face, pulled from the opposite side, severing the dark cloth from its fake brass rod. Finally, the panting women stared at the folds of fabric lying in waves on the floor; and together looked into the brittle glass face of grief. Neither Lonnie nor Clara could have known at the time that helping Mandy was the glue that kept them together. Once she was beyond their help, their love affair fizzled. It shouldn’t have. It made no sense. The worst was over. Whenever Clara flew home to see her sister, she came back to Lonnie wrecked. One night at dinner she told him, “Mandy said she was trying to withdraw from Ativan, and she would feel better if she could sleep in my bed with me. ‘Like we did when we were little and you kept the ghosts away,’ she said. I was horrified.” “By what, exactly?” Lonnie let the noodles he had wound around his fork tines slip off. He had lost his appetite. “Firstly, that I never guessed that was why she wanted to share a bed with me when we were children. I thought she was just being clingy, making up stories about ghosts bothering her as an excuse.” “And secondly?” “I’m ashamed to say I just didn’t want her near me. The side effects of some of her drugs make her stinky and sweaty, and she twitches all night from the withdrawal. I love her but she’s disgusting.” “You’ve got compassion fatigue.” “I guess. Mom’s got it too. Mandy wants to practically climb on her lap when they’re sitting together, and it turns Mom off.” “Doesn’t Mandy outweigh your mother by now?” Clara nodded, smiled a little, the urge to ridicule present even in her; and then went right on detailing Mandy’s latest symptoms. Suddenly Lonnie found that he had had enough. “Please don’t talk about her anymore. I can’t stand it,” he pleaded. Would he have uttered those words if he had known how deep they would cut, and that they would forever ride Clara’s skin like a scar? What’s done is done, as Mother would say. After they broke up, Lonnie took a job at another conservatory. He was a coward, he admitted, but a clean break was the only way he could fully reconnect with his music. He felt destined for a real career, and that meant he had to focus. He worked to push his grief and guilt about Clara down; some nights, unable to sleep in his new and unfamiliar place, he’d throw off his covers and go down to walk on the deserted sidewalks of his unfamiliar neighborhood. There would be no second set of steps coming to bring the night to order, no matter how hard he listened for them. Sometimes he could almost feel Clara’s hand in his as he walked along, weeping. He wanted to ask her what he should do about losing her. He stretched out his arms, imploring, but they closed on empty air. Over time, he felt less keenly his loss. He told himself he was right not to want to share Clara with her sister. He was right to turn away from the prospect of love split in half and ground under the boot of family loyalty. He could never have had Clara, not entirely. Mandy would have prevented it: the tyranny of the weak. As he gradually righted himself in the arms of a series of women, Lonnie felt a sense of freedom that gave rise to a renewed rush of ambition. He rose easily through the ranks to full professor. No scandals dogged him. Opportunities for entanglements presented themselves: the older he got, the more interested his students were in him. He was not, however, easily flattered. When his parents died, he settled their estate, taking his boyhood bed out of his childhood home to his new apartment. It was near the university where he had accepted a post, and settling back into the old neighborhood, Lonnie kept an eye out for Mandy. Everyone knew what everyone else was up to in the little town, and it was easy to track her art shows. Lonnie never attended the openings, not wanting to have to speak to her directly, but he would tour the exhibits later. He liked to think he could determine the state of her mental health by the quality and subject of her pictures. He had no idea, of course. One evening he was driving by a gallery hosting one of Mandy’s shows. He slowed his car to watch the thin stream of people as they entered the building and while he was stopped at the light, Lonnie saw Mandy and her mother walking across the intersection. Had they recognized him? No, it didn’t seem so. They were looking down, careful of their footsteps. As Mandy helped her mother step up to the curb, the old lady tripped and came crashing down on the sidewalk, her brittle hip shattering. Lonnie immediately called 911 from his car, his message punctuated by her distant screams, his voice so squeezed by panic he could barely get the words out. He sat in his car, shaking, until the ambulance came. Only then did he notice the line of traffic behind him at the stoplight, honking furiously. Once back in his apartment, it took him hours to calm down. Should he call the hospital to see how Mrs. Patterson was doing? Should he call Clara and let her know her mother had been hurt? Offer Mandy his help? He should, and he would, certainly. There was no reason to be ambivalent about right and wrong. Time passed. It was surprising, even to him, how easily the incident slipped from his consciousness. He was busy with classes to teach, auditions to hear, course evaluations to do. Every so often, the image of the accident would flit through his mind, and he’d wave it away like a bug. It was none of his concern, really. He had become an outsider. One day, in his office, Lonnie rose from his desk to stretch. He ran his fingers over the keys of his studio piano, played a few scales and then abruptly stopped. He returned to his desk and the endless papers to shuffle. Scanning the stack of applications for an opening in the piano department, he felt a shock go through his body. The electric jab pointed out a familiar signature on one application. Clara! She wanted to come home. He pushed away from his desk and began to pace furiously. He couldn’t let that happen, not now, though Mandy and her mother would benefit from Clara’s help. However, it wouldn’t help Clara to mire herself once again in domestic quicksand. That wasn’t up to him to decide, of course, and it wasn’t even the real reason that he wanted to keep the woman he had loved for most of his adulthood at bay. Lonnie was just about to complicate his life in a way that Clara should never know about. He was accustomed to living without her, and must continue to live without her for everyone’s sake. He denied her request. After the sabotage of one woman, he tried to do the right thing by another. If he could redeem his mistakes by forcing a different ending on his story, it would prove he was not a coward. “I need to say something you might not want to hear.” Lonnie stiffened, but took Clara’s hand. After the accidents that had brought them back together, they had resumed their old collaboration in earnest; and were now sitting on his piano bench, practicing for a performance at the university. Clara was to be the special guest artist-in-residence in a program series Lonnie had implemented. It was the least he could do. They were colleagues again, but her attention was once more being diverted by her sister. The closer the date of Mandy’s memorial came, the more Clara’s concentration frayed, and the more mistakes she made at the piano. Was she going to back out of this program, too? “Nobody knows this but my brothers, but when Mandy shot herself, the bullet lodged in her belly, just under a rib.” “Yes?” He leaned in, listening hard. “I was on the way to visit her, heard the shot and found her bleeding on the floor of her apartment. The paramedics came right away, but it all seemed to happen in slow motion.” Lonnie began to rub her back while she continued, between pained breaths. “They took her to the hospital and against all odds, they saved her life.” Lonnie snatched his hand from her back as though he had been burned. “You said she was dead!” “Think back. I never said that. I said she shot herself.” “You let everyone believe she died! Why?” “She is beyond reach. She’s psychotic, living in some kind of parallel world, and she’ll be in the asylum for as long as she lives.” “Why didn’t you tell me, at least?” “I wanted to. I intended to tell her friends, too, and I tried. But they all wanted to believe she was a suicide and kept shouting down my theory that it must have been an accident because she wasn’t suicidal. They kept contradicting me, insisting they knew better than I did. I got disgusted with them finally and decided to just let them think and do whatever they wanted about it. I never believed they’d go through with the memorial, and I ran out of time and courage and the chance to tell them the truth.” “You didn’t run out of time with me! Did I disgust you, as well? I swallowed your story completely, and came to the same conclusion about suicide. Where’s the difference?” “Of course I wasn’t disgusted! I knew you would believe whatever I chose to tell you but I didn’t know if I could trust you with the whole story. You did abandon me because of my involvement with Mandy, you know.” “And only now…?” Clara moved her shoulders in either a shrug or a cringe. “So, this deception was fine with your brothers?” “Yes. Since Mandy can’t respond to visitors, we thought it would be better if she had none. We don’t want her on display, and old friends she might not recognize would just confuse her more.” “What did the doctors say about that theory?” “Nothing. We didn’t tell them. None of her old doctors knew that she was delusional. They assured us she was stable. At least the new docs seem to know she’s living in a delusion now, so we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. However, we don’t need their opinion on everything.” “Well, are you going to put my name on that permitted visitors list?” Clara looked at him as if it was an odd thing to ask. “Why would you want to look at her in that state? I always thought you’d run a mile to get away from her.” Was it her stare? Clara wanted to say. Admit it was the stare. When he didn’t answer, panic overtook her and she began to ramble. “Did you know that we caught her hitting Mom? Her only excuse was that she has a violent nature.” Clara was suddenly desperate for him to see things from her point-of-view. She didn’t want to trash her sister but he should know how and why her feelings toward Mandy had changed. “Since when?” “Apparently she used to beat up her classmates in elementary school. She blinded one little boy. That’s why her art is all about vision of one sort or another,” Clara said through the lump of tears forming in her throat. “Her personality changed after the relapse she had last year. She was in the hospital for two months. The doctors said she was stable after many more months of treatment and an ongoing protocol, and would be able to resume living with Mom as long as she had lots of help with the household. That’s why the boys and I moved back in, and hired all those aides. I suppose you think I should have told you about all that, too.” Her voice was breaking now, and she expected to feel Lonnie’s arms around her, hear reassurances in the low-slung music of his voice. He angled his body away from hers instead. “I know all about the relapse.” She trained a sharp quizzical eye on him but before she could ask him her question, he answered hers. “You should have told me.” “You can’t force a person confide in you. We all have things we keep to ourselves. Some are too upsetting to talk about, and revelations can’t be rushed.” She looked at him but he would not meet her gaze. Instead he said, “What are you going to do about the memorial?” “I can’t back out now. Brenda will go on with it anyway, whether I show up or not. I keep trying to get her to call it an art exhibit or a retrospective, but she always goes back to the word memorial, even though she thinks I don’t like it because I can’t believe Mandy’s really gone.” She and Lonnie fell into an uncomfortable silence before Clara added, “An artist often has a retrospective in her lifetime, and Brenda says the museum plans on keeping the art up for a month, like a real exhibition.” “Uh-huh.” Lonnie looked as if he was making some kind of determination, the way he leaned forward with clasped hands between his knees. Finally he said, “I know you must wonder if my dealings with your sister were restricted to selling her my old car.” No, Clara wanted to say, don’t tell me. Just don’t. Lonnie took a deep breath. “Awhile after your mother broke her hip, I stopped by the house to check on them. I had no idea your mom had developed dementia, too. Mandy opened the door, and fell into my arms as if she and I were the long-lost couple.” Clara stood up. “I was the only one she could trust in town, she said. You weren’t on speaking terms with her any longer, she said. I had no reason to disbelieve her, although I figured it must have been something huge to keep you away from her and your mother. I didn’t know you were still travelling to see them every few months. I never caught a glimpse of you, and Mandy never said when you were in town, of course, or when you moved back entirely. I thought she was alone, trying to care for your mother the way your mother had taken care of her. I felt I had no choice but to look out for her, if only for your sake.” “I suppose you slept with her for my sake, too?” He hung his head. All their lives, Mandy had tried to put her fingerprints on everything her sister touched. Wishing for a different ending, open-ended as the Chekov story…and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning… Clara rose to go.
0 Comments
|
AuthorCheryl Snell is an award-winning poet and novelist, author of the new family saga Bombay Trilogy, a retelling of her previous novels Shiva's Arms, Rescuing Ranu, and Kalpavriksha. Archives
October 2020
Categories |